Charlie Brenneman (Josh Hedges/UFC)
Welterweights expected to meet on June 8 card
The UFC’s next card on the FX cable network continues to fill up with the addition of a welterweight bout to the lineup.
Highly touted Brazilian Erick Silva will meet Charlie Brenneman on the June 8 card according to a report from Globo.com’s SporTV. UFC officials have not yet announced the fight booking, however.
UFC on FX 3 does not yet have a confirmed location or venue due to a fan contest by top-tier sponsor Harley-Davidson. Fan voting in the Harley-Davidson Hometown Throwdown will determine where the event will take place. UFC president Dana White has said he expects the location to be announced soon, perhaps this week.
Silva (13-2, 1 NC, 1-1 UFC) is coming off a controversial disqualification loss to Carlo Prater at UFC 142 in his native Brazil in January. In that fight, Silva moved in quickly against Prater and appeared to have gotten a TKO victory when Mario Yamasaki waved the fight off. But he was, in fact, disqualifying Silva for illegal strikes to the back of Prater’s head. Replays showed Yamasaki may have been too liberal in his assessment of those strikes. The DQ stood – though Silva was given his win bonus by the UFC, regardless.
In his first fight with the promotion, also in Brazil at UFC 134 last August, he picked up a 40-second TKO against Luis Ramos. And it was thought that his 29-second bout against Prater was more of the same until Yamasaki announced the disqualification. The June 8 bout against Brenneman will be Silva’s first fight outside of his native Brazil.
Brenneman (15-3, 4-2 UFC) got back in the win column in January with a unanimous decision win over Daniel Roberts at UFC on FX: Guillard vs. Miller in Nashville, Tenn. Last October, he suffered a head kick knockout against Anthony Johnson that snapped a two-fight winning streak – one of which was an upset of welterweight contender Rick Story in a short-notice fight at UFC on Versus 4 last June.
UFC on FX 3 will feature a flyweight rematch between Demetrious Johnson and Ian McCall, who fought to a draw earlier this month in Sydney, Australia, in the semifinals of the UFC’s 125-pound tournament. Though their fight was supposed to go to a sudden-victory round to determine the finalist, an error tabulating the scores by the commissioner caused Johnson to be declared the split decision winner when the real result was a split draw. The winner of that fight moves on to face Joseph Benavidez, who like Johnson dropped down from bantamweight, for the UFC’s first flyweight title.